Have you lost someone close? Grieving is a necessary phase, and of course it hurts. But many people can’t move past grief and loss, to remember the person they loved with only joy and thankfulness.
Grief doesn’t happen only for a person (or pet) who has died. People may be grieving over divorce, over big financial loss, over the loss of a cherished way of life, over the loss of land they grew up with — or over specific traumas such as illness trauma, including loss of a body part, fertility, motherhood, health — or over a deathbed trauma.
Now there is a quick, easy way to dissolve grief that gets stuck.
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is a remarkable self-help technique, based on research. It relieves stress, pain and suffering, often faster than you might think possible.
‘Grieving proves my love’?
Some people have the idea that the strength and length of their grief and loss process demonstrate the extent of their love for the dead person, be that a baby, child, relative, friend, or favourite dog. But actually, all that ongoing grief does is to continually bring down the griever, often into depression, and even into physical illness. Nobody benefits.
How can EFT tapping help with grief?
Grief has different faces, including anger and guilt as well as sadness. A mourner might feel angry that the person left, or died; perhaps there is guilt for actions done or not done.
EFT targets each emotion separately, and quickly reduces the intensity of each. If an EFT beginner cannot get significant results, that’s a time to get help from an experienced EFT practitioner.
This simple method of tapping on meridian endpoints on the skin soothes the amygdala portion of the brain, which is activated by stress (according to research at Harvard Medical School). At the same time, the tapping soothes the body’s electromagnetic meridian energy system, also disrupted by stress.
This stress reduction effect is permanent, when carried out thoroughly.
As an EFT coach I often deal with people who are grieving for people they have lost, either recently or years ago.
As the burden of stuck emotions clears away in a one-hour session, the client begins spontaneously to focus on happier memories of the lost person, truly honoring the value of the relationship.
Have you made a destructive decision?
Also, EFT’s many techniques can quickly and gently free up limiting mindsets that frequently take hold around bereavement, such as ‘I could have saved him/her’, ‘I let people down’, and even ‘I’ll never love again’.
Grief and loss don’t need to be an insurmountable burden, although they may feel like that. If you have not tried EFT, you may not believe this. Have you had success with EFT tapping?
For 14 years, U.S. woman Kathy Hutchinson had been unable to do anything for herself, since a stroke. Now, thanks to science, she is pioneering a new robotic aid.
When she sits staring at a bottled drink with a straw, imagining a robot arm seizing the bottle and conveying it to her mouth — the robot does her bidding! She sips from the straw.
The science journal Nature reports on this groundbreaking ‘brain translation technology’, called Braingate, which works because of aspirin-size sensors placed in the part of Kathy’s brain that would normally control her right arm.
Fortunately, it does not matter whether Kathy moves a limb or merely imagines moving that limb. The scientists have created a product that virtually reads Kathy’s thoughts.
While this robot technology won’t be available to the public for years, hopes are that it will bring new mobility to other people with ‘locked in’ syndrome and to amputees.
Challenge for EFT tapping
In people without such disabilities, the same principle holds good: the mind cannot tell the difference between a real event and a vividly imagined event.
This enables people to use mental tapping effectively for themselves.
For example, lying unable to go to sleep is a situation where actual tapping on the body’s meridian endpoints would keep a person awake. But what does work in many cases is when the person imagines carrying out the tapping routine on him or herself, while thinking something like, ‘Even though I can’t get to sleep, I accept who I am and what I feel.’
From those successes, it’s only a step to imagine teaching the basic EFT tapping process to someone like Kathy, a quadraplegic who can’t speak although she can type her thoughts on a device cued by her eye movements.
Ideally, then, if Kathy were feeling anxious, sad, angry or any other uncomfortable emotion, she may well be able to do EFT tapping herself in her mind, to feel better quickly…
The world is full of opportunities for EFT tapping to make a big difference.
When I’m holding private EFT tapping sessions in a comfortably furnished room, my stressed client and I could be anywhere –although a glance through the window here does show me an unfamiliar red earth hillside in Alice Springs. But if I were to soar up to a birds-eye view, I would see that that comfortable room exists in the very middle of Australia, a microdot in the vast, vast desert, as far as you can get from the sea in all directions.
As I am a coast-dweller currently in an unfamiliar setting, I somehow expect the stresses here in multicultural Alice Springs to be different. But they aren’t. Whether the client is aboriginal or Brazilian, an ocker or an Englishman, the pain is the same. We tap away anger, betrayal, fear, anxiety, depression, shock, jealousy, poor self-image, devastated hopes …. We tap in new possibilities, new happiness, a new start.. .
Rage for change
I have met someone here who I would love to have offered an EFT session, to relieve her stress. She’s alive now only in people’s memories, especially in the botanic garden she established, that bears her name. Miss Olive Pink was an eccentric anthropologist , a Tasmanian-born woman who found inspiration in meeting another eccentric anthropologist, Daisy Bates, in the outback. After staying with Daisy at her camp in northern South Australia in 1926, Olive embarked on her own anthropological career.
Both these indomitable, courageous women championed aboriginal culture and welfare. Both lived alone for years in tents and tiny huts, often in searing heat, while collecting information about culture and customs.
Miss Pink became a formidable figure in Alice Springs in the 1940s and 1950s. She lived in a primitive ex-Army hut, making a small income by selling flowers from her garden, exhibiting her artwork, and cleaning the courthouse. Politicians learned to quake at her determined – often vitriolic — lobbying on behalf of aboriginals. Many of her persuasive and angry letters survive in archives and collections around Australia. She died in Alice Springs in 1975, aged 91.
Peace to Miss Pink.
Marilyn was spending most of her time worrying. She worried about her grandchildren, about her job, about her health, about her neighbors, about anything at all. She just could not stop the anxiety– until she tried EFT tapping.
When she came to me for an EFT session, as many people naturally are, she was sceptical that tapping on her acupuncture points could make any improvement in her life.
She was also in pain down her right side, with sciatica, and winced as she sat in the chair. I showed her the remedial EFT 30-second tap-and-talk routine that we repeat a few times, and I explained that the only thing this routine did was to calm and balance her, so it was safe and gentle.
I asked what topic she would like to work on. She said she had so many problems, she couldn’t decide. We narrowed it down to one, to begin.
Grandson problem
Her young grandson was a tearaway child, and it seemed nobody could control him. Marilyn worried that he would get into trouble and end up in detention and later in jail. Having tried to advise him with no result, she would spend a good part of every day worrying about him.
We began to tap away this stress, tapping on her acupressure points while saying words such as, Even though I’m so worried about Trevor, I accept myself. At first Marilyn found this strange. The idea of accepting herself just as she was seemed new. But she continued. Even though I’m so worried about Trevor, I accept and love myself anyway.
Within a couple of minutes, Marilyn felt herself relaxing a little. This in itself was unusual. She could see that nothing had changed except her own stress, but that was indeed letting go. She was beginning to stop the anxiety herself.
We went on doing the same small routine about her Trevor worries: Even though I’m so worried about Trevor, my worry doesn’t help him and it damages myself, and I accept myself anyway.
She now said wonderingly, ‘Trevor’s not my problem!’ Her worry level was coming down. Even though I’m still worried about Trevor, I’ve done all I can do, and I accept and love myself, deeply and completely.
A couple of minutes later Marilyn said, ‘Stop!’ She was holding her painful leg. She looked amazed as she said, ‘The pain’s not as bad now.’
She had discovered for herself that her stress level was connected with the sciatic pain — and that EFT tapping was relieving both.
And – just as important – she now said, ‘I feel better about myself!’ She was overcome with surprise and delight.
Marilyn chose not to continue with her 1-hour session, but took away my book, ‘Tapping Your Troubles Away’ to learn more on how to use EFT tapping for herself at home.
She had found an OFF switch for her worry about Trevor. And she could also apply this simple technique to stop the anxiety on other topics. I assured her that she could get more help from an EFT practitioner, in person or by phone or on Skype.
